Promoting strong public schools for Providence\’s East Side and beyond

Smaller Schools

Nathan Bishop has a current capacity of about 850. The Nathan Bishop Committee recommended a middle school of about 450. The DeJong proposal puts the population of the new school at 600. Bill Mott has kindly sent along an article about how performance is improved by small school initiatives in New York. Graduation rates were 20% higher at these schools. Here’s a quote:

“These schools show that a culture of high expectations, rigorous academics, and individualized attention accompanied by the appropriate supports help students to succeed in their secondary education.”

You can read the rest of the story and find a link to the report here:.

NYC High School Reforms Boost Student Performance, Study Finds

Created just four years ago, the first group of new small high schools in New York City is graduating students at rates that are 20 percent higher than the citywide average, a new report from San Francisco-based WestEd (http://wested.org/cs/we/print/docs/we/home.htm) finds.

Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the report, Rethinking High School: Inaugural Graduations at New York City’s New High Schools (28 pages, PDF), presents preliminary data on graduation rates from fourteen small high schools that opened in 2002 as part of the Children First reform agenda introduced by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the New Century High Schools Initiative.

According to the report, 81 percent of the seniors at the new schools applied to college, while 85 percent of the same stu- dents were accepted to either two- or four-year institutions.

When those graduates had entered ninth grade, more than 80 per- cent of them did not meet New York state standards in English or math. The schools surveyed also reported higher attendance and ninth-grade promotion rates than other schools in the system.

Based on their findings, WestEd researchers recommend that the city’s board of education take steps to scale up the small-school initiative beyond the 197 small schools currently operating. They also recommend that the city align K-8 reforms with high school improvement strategies, expand rigorous course offerings through partnerships or online learning, do more to address enrollment and space challenges, track students after graduation, and apply the lessons of small schools to broader secondary reform.

“Our research shows that these new schools are doing exactly what they set out to do,” said Tracy Huebner, a WestEd senior research associate and principal author of the report. “These schools show that a culture of high expectations, rigorous academics, and individualized attention accompanied by the appropriate supports help students to succeed in their secondary education.”